Tag Archive: Lessig

I think the simplest form of remixing and it relates to our class is the blog that we use. It ties in nicely with Lessig’s Remix, at the beginning it was only the form of writing and as the internet evolves, the first blog was created called Usenet. But the Usenet was really organized and people started to post cross-group commercial, which we are all very familiar: spam. Later on as the internet evolves blogs was created. Even then it was still not organized enough where random people posting random blogs and people are reading other people’s blog where they don’t even know them. As the blog evolves tagging and ranking, which allows people to find information around the interent from an one central place. With all these features above blogs became more and more popular, from social network website to educational use, like what we are doing. Sharing summary readings to insightful videos on the blog

This video is based on a recording from a WAFF-48 news report about an attempted rape in Huntsville, Alabama. A video of the news report was first posted to the WAFF-48 website on July 29, 2010 and then copied and uploaded to YouTube on the same day. Just two days later The Gregory Brothers relased an Auto-Tuned song version of the news report(Wikipedia).

An interesting correlation is made between media and the information that it is presenting at all times. Specifically, there is mention of how all the elite people back in the day spoke latin and all the common people spoke the regional languages. The elite didn’t speak the common tongues because they believed their information was important so that only other elitist would be able to understand it and the common people were only given the information that others deemed they should know. This is similar to how information is transmitted today through modern medias. Not everyone can make media at the highest level of professionalism but everyone can be influenced by it. Those influences only hold merit based on the culture they were based on. In other words, these remixes only have meaning because of the meaning surrounded by the items that they were pulled from.

Below is a link from Jonathan McIntosh mentioned in the writing.

This clip particularly exemplifies the point made above. Its part of our culture that you cant trust the news and alot of people do not trust Fox News especially. The video, without the context of what it references in our culture, really has no meaning.

The next link is another specifically mentioned in the text about how although remixing may be used to clarify or project a particular meaning it can also be used to askew one as well.

In summary, in regards to remixes “their meaning comes not from the content of what they say; it comes from the reference, which is expressible only if it is the original that gets used.” Meaning without the the original content the new content can not be made. More importantly without the original context the new context can not be conveyed.

Remixing is the way we combine different media resources into a new way of representing a message into a new visual context. The way Lessig represents media as a single form and then introducing the human factor of combining these works into a newly developed form using two media sources. In the change of time and age of technology we are now able to remix a media form into something no one has ever seen before. This is what the human participatory population wants to see, something new. Years ago when technology was not as advanced as it is today we were unable to remix a media and take it back to its original form, we were only able to basically destroy it for good. Today’s digital ages allows us to direct pieces of media digitally and still allowing us to have its original state. In the example that Lessig gave about Bush’s speech being media remixed, shows an intention of people to harm ones profile over the media sources. The way the media content was displayed to the public allowed for everyones point of views to then be altered into another state, then allowing people to act differently toward Bush from their previous perspective. The participatory population is the one accepting factor on how media gets transformed into a media source that everyone is familiar with and whats to become aport of.

In this section Lessig focuses on remixed writing. His example of this is the way that writing and reading has evolved to blogging. In the beginning blogging was unorganized and not worth anything. But after the addition of tags it allowed blogs to become much more useful and meaningful. With tags and linking people could easily navigate blogs to find information they are interested in which gave order to the crazy atmosphere of early blogging. Also in the growing remix of text came the availability to add comments to blogs to give feedback to the writer or to start conversation or debate about the piece. After the ability to link and add comments came the blogging ranking system where sites were able to count how many people linked back to a certain blog to create an order of popularity.

Lessig also argues that blogs are a much better source for information than the main stream media in their delivery of both quality and truth. Even though many blogs are ridiculous with their content, Lessig wants to focus on the creativity that it sparks. It is a space where anyone can share their view point with out having to worry about getting publicly criticized or embarrased except by the comments that people can post.